RegEd buying Arkovi

Well known compliance tech and education provider bringing social media archiving and control tools into the fold

There is a new romance being consummated in the advisory social media archiving and tracking technology world.

That is a mouthful.

Getting down to specifics, RegEd, a very well-known provider of compliance technology, services, and educational information to the financial services industry announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Arkovi, a web-based social media archiving and surveillance system familiar to many advisers.

While terms for the acquisition were not made public the deal is expected to close in October.

In a nutshell it came down to buy a proven product rather than build one from scratch; Arkovi will now be a linchpin in RegEd's Social Media and Communications Compliance offering.

“I'm glad we didn't have to build it ourselves — and we have been approached continuously by our enterprise firms asking us to come up with something in this fractured landscape,” said RegEd chief executive John M. Schobel in an interview last week.

“Started w/continuing education and began layering on more and more things; we have two million end users when you consider our insurance agents,” he added.

He went on to explain that enterprise buyers are demanding that their compliance-related technology come from a single source these days.

“We looked at Arkovi and Blane's [Warrene] forward-looking vision and how they made it so that you didn't have to have discrete software, it absolutely compelled us,” added Mr. Schobel.

Mr. Warrene, Arkovi's founder said during the interview that he had been a long-time user of RegEd's technology in various previous positions he has held in the industry and that the firm and its culture represented a good match for Arkovi.

“Social [media] has created this new bridge and I saw this as having a much broader opportunity for us in terms of future development,” Mr. Warrene said of the acquisition.

The potential of the merger provides both firms the opportunity to more quickly bring a total platform to market that competes directly with the handful of other comprehensive systems available.

These include those of Actiance Inc., Hearsay Social Inc., Protegent Social Media Surveillance from SunGard, Smarsh Inc., and Socialware Inc.

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